Various diagnoses and preventive techniques are used in the clinic to prevent spread of infections. For example, quick kits for easy and quick diagnosis of respiratory infections such as influenza are widely available. A diagnosis using a quick kit involves inserting a cotton swab into the nasal cavity of a patient to collect the bodily fluid from the nasal cavity, and detecting antigens of viruses, bacteria, and other microbes in the bodily fluid by immunochromatography.
Despite the simplicity of the diagnosis by the quick kit, it requires collecting antigens of microbes directly from the body of a patient. The procedure thus qualifies as medical practice, and limited to only healthcare professionals. This has created a need for a method that can be used to more conveniently detect microbes. To this end, there has been proposed a method that directly traps viruses, bacteria, and other air-borne microbes from the breath, and detects these microbes by way of gene amplification and image processing.
Patent Literature 1 describes an example of microbe detection from breath. In the microbe detection system of this publication, microbes in air are trapped by impaction at the surface of the trapping section of a microbe detection chip, and the trapped microbes are eluted into a liquid. The liquid containing the microbes is then transferred to a different chip to detect the microbes through gene amplification.
Another example of microbe detection is described in Patent Literature 2. This publication uses a system that uses a membrane method to capture and detect microbes. Specifically, a pored membrane is disposed between a top surface part and a bottom surface part, and used to capture microbes larger than the pores and contained in a fluid. The captured microbes are stained with a visualization reagent for observation and analysis by image processing with a CCD camera, or by inspection with an electron microscope or the like.